Glip by RingCentral

Pros

Includes collaborative document editing, a team calendar, and task management.
Good image and PDF markup tools.

Cons

A user can only be a full member of one account.
Not ideal for time-disparate teams.
No keyword notifications.

Bottom Line

Glip by RingCentral adds a few special components to team messaging, such as collaborative document editing and image markup.

April 24, 2018

As people become increasingly disenchanted with email, they turn to business messaging apps to communicate with coworkers. Glip is an online team chat app from RingCentral that shares many similarities with competitors such as Flock, Slack, and Stride. Glip lets you have real-time or asynchronous conversations with colleagues in a space that favors brevity and directness. It also tosses in collaborative to-do lists, documents, and a team calendar, all of which add value. Glip is a solid choice for a business chat app, particularly among groups who value its added features, but Slack and Microsoft Teams remain PCMag's Editors' Choices for their excellent support for integrations, top-notch management features, and flexibility.

Price and Plans

Glip has two account levels: Free and Standard. Note that users of the RingCentral Office have the option of using Glip as an integrated part of their RingCentral service.

Glip Free is quite generous. With the Free account, you get unlimited posts, storage space for uploads, integrations, and guest users. Guests are usually third-party collaborators who can only see what goes on with the teams to which they are specifically invited. The Free account's only real limit is that you only get 500 minutes of video chats per month, shared across the organization.

Glip Standard costs $5 per person per month and gives you everything in the Free plan, plus premium support. It also increases the number of video chat minutes to 1,000 per person per month, shared. So, for example, one person on a three-person team can use all 3,000 minutes without any issues, as long as the other team members use none. Standard accounts also get advanced administration options (for controlling sharing, sign-ups, and employee privileges), data retention policies, and Compliance exports. This last capability lets administrators export archived data to show compliance to regulatory bodies, lawyers, or internal employees. The recent passage of GDPR in the EU might make this feature a must-have for all organizations.

Glip's Standard version is pricier than other team messaging apps, but it still costs less than Slack's equivalent tier. Slack has three types of paid accounts: Standard, Plus, and Enterprise. Standard costs $8 per active user per month and Plus costs $15 per active user per month, with a slight discount for either when paying annually (it works out to $6.67 and $12.50 per active user per month, respectively). Plus accounts get 20GB of storage per person. Enterprise accounts are charged based on the needs of the organization. Slack also has a free account, which is more limited than Glip Free. Slack Free limits your search history to the last 10K messages, supports just 10 integrations, restricts video calls to one-on-one conversations only, and restricts storage space to 5GB.

Another business chat app, Atlassian Stride, costs less than Glip for its paid account, at just $3 per person per month. Competitors Flock and Zoho Cliq also charge $3 per person per month for their premium plans. Twist's Unlimited account costs the same as Glip's Standard account. Flock, Stride, Twist, and Zoho Cliq all offer free account options as well.

If you don't want to pay for a separate messaging app, you could just use tools bundled with existing corporate software. One example is Workplace by Facebook, which is more of a business social network. It does, however, include text, audio, and video chat. Pricing for Workplace by Facebook starts at $3 per active user per month for the first 1,000 people. The per-person price decreases as the number of users increases after that initial threshold.

Additionally, Microsoft Teams comes with Office 365 and doesn't require any additional purchase. Business accounts start at $8.25 per user per month and include 1TB of online storage per user. A free 30-day trial is available, but there's no free account level.

Setup and Features

When you sign up to try Glip, the first step is to invite other people to join you. You do so via email, either by entering each person's email address or by allowing anyone who is part of a certain domain to join, such as @pcmag.com, for example.

Glip only allows you to associate your email with one account, however. If you already have a Glip account and are invited to join another, you have two options. You can accept the invitation as a guest user with limited accessibility, or you can renounce your other affiliation and switch to the new group. This seems particularly limited when compared with Slack, which allows users to switch accounts with ease.

After inviting people to join, the next step is to set up Teams. Teams are Glip's equivalent of Slack's Channels and Stride's Rooms, and are the main way to cluster or segment conversations. While Slack's and Stride's respective nomenclatures invite discussions based on a theme, Glip's terminology encourages specific groups of people to talk together no matter the topic. Technically speaking, a Team can be whatever you want, but Glip's name suggests you should set up Teams based on departments or groups of people who work on the same project. It doesn't necessarily encourage cross-organization socializing.

On the topic of teams, Glip offers a good set of administration features. For example, admins can delete posts, add or delete members, and change privacy settings. Additionally, admins can prevent other people from posting, add integrations, or pin items to the shelf (a sidebar for housing important or relevant information to the team). Keep in mind that the person who creates a Team is its admin, though he or she can give other users these permissions, as well.

Although teams are the organizational unit in Glip, you can also send direct, private messages to a specific person or group of people. As is typical with such messaging apps, using the @ symbol before someone's name alerts that person of the message.

Glip's visual cues should be familiar to anyone who has used a modern instant messaging program. A green dot next to someone's name means they are online and active. A yellow dot means the person is idle or has some kind of away or busy status (more on this below). No dot means the person is not signed into the account.

You can customize your busy status with a few choice words—such as "Back after 2 p.m."—but no one will see it unless they navigate to their last messaging session with you. The app Twist handles out-of-office and other statuses much better. In Twist, certain busy and away statuses come with a custom icon that replaces your profile picture. When you're on vacation, your colleagues see a palm tree and beach scene instead of your face. It clearly and immediately informs them that you're not going to be online anytime soon. Plus, with Twist, you can set a date for your return. That's a smart design choice and feels like common sense. Why don't more collaboration apps do it?

With Glip, you can always start a video call using the video camera icon at the top of the screen. Say you start an impromptu video call with everyone in the Marketing Team. People who are signed into the app and part of the team get an alert that they are invited to the video chat (so long as they haven't changed their notification settings), but joining is optional. Glip also includes Whiteboard features for real-time collaboration, as well as support for emoji and animated GIFs (via Giphy).

Advanced Features

Glip has a few extra features, such as collaborative document editing and a team calendar, not seen in most other team messaging apps natively, except Microsoft Teams. That said, you can usually add these features to other apps via third-party integrations. In any case, they are integral parts of the Glip experience.

To-dos are one of these features. In Glip, you can quickly create a task, assign it to someone, note the deadline, and even attach relevant files. You can use tasks privately as well, to keep track of your own to-do list, which is handy if you haven't already settled on a dedicated to-do list app.

Glip's team calendar is another handy feature. You can choose to display any tasks that have deadlines here. If you already manage a calendar elsewhere, you might consider connecting it to Glip, which supports Google Calendar, Outlook, and iCal.

To-dos and a calendar are nice additions, but the meaty features are collaborative documents and the ability to annotate images. Collaborative documents work a lot like Google Docs in the sense that you can enable real-time editing and commenting for everyone on a single document. We imagine this capability is immensely handy for small teams that don't need a full collaborative editing suite of apps. If that sounds appealing, you might be interested in a collaboration app that focuses on that aspect more than business chat, such as Samepage.

Equally impressive is the ability to annotate images within Glip. Ask any art director who has to take feedback from non-artistic people and you quickly learn just how poorly people communicate their ideas with words alone. With certain kinds of communication, it helps to point to specifics. Glip lets you do that right in the app, with documents, PDFs, or image files. That's a huge bonus for teams that frequently discuss visual materials.

What's Missing?

Though Glip has many special features, it's missing a few capabilities found in competing apps. One complaint about messaging apps in general is that conversations easily get lost in the ongoing feed. This problem particularly affects Glip Teams distributed across several time zones, since it may take several hours for the right person to see a pertinent question or comment. Twist has solved this problem by designing an app that looks more like email. It compartmentalizes each discussion within a channel. It's totally orderly. Slack tried something similar with threaded conversations but has been less successful with its implementation.

Flock has a handy read-only option that allows organizational heads to disseminate information in a dedicated channel easily without the message getting hidden by unrelated emoji and GIF replies. Glip has a feature that's nearly the same in its admin controls. Another way you could achieve a similar outcome in Glip is to create and publish a document in the app and lock it so that other members can't edit it.

Slack has a unique feature that lets individuals create keyword-triggered notifications. When anyone uses those words in a public conversation, you get a notification. Glip doesn't offer keyword notifications, nor do any other team messaging apps that we know of, as of this writing.

Apps and Integrations

Glip runs in any web browser, but you can download the desktop app for Windows or Mac. Additionally, Glip has mobile apps for iOS and Android for teammates who need to stay connected when they are away from their desks.

In addition to supporting major calendar services, Glip also connects with many other apps. You can integrate Glip with email, file storage services (Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive), and many popular business apps, such as Trello and Zendesk. The list is healthy. If there's an app you need that it doesn't support natively, there's a good chance it's in the Zapier network, which also works with Glip. Zapier is a third-party service that lets you connect apps that don't easily speak to one another, similar to the more consumer- and IoT-focused IFTTT. The big advantage with Zapier is that you can connect disparate apps without writing any code.

Unique Appeal

Glip is an excellent business messaging app for groups who value its collaborative document editing, image and PDF markup tools, and the generous capabilities of its free version. The paid version is on the higher end of the price spectrum, however, as other capable services, such as Flock and Twist cost less. Editors' Choice Slack's premium plans are more expensive than Glip's, but those offer valuable features, such as keyword notifications, threaded conversations, and the ability to join and switch between multiple accounts without restriction. Microsoft Teams is another Editors' Choice due to its excellent integration with Office 365 and great management features.

Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, ... See Full Bio